Weekly Reading — July 15, 2017
What Caught My Attention this Week
In addition to my own blog, I read a lot of blogs and wanted to start sharing some of my favorite posts each week. The content will vary week by week but will always be a few things that caught my attention and made me think over the past week. Here are my selections for this week.
Alternate View Layers for an Elm App — Pablo Brasero
If you have read my blog even a little bit, you know I’m more than a bit obsessed with Elm. One of the big complaints I hear from newcomers surrounds the lack of an HTML template language. While I personally think life is better without that, this post may inspire a few people to play with Elm. I also think it’s a really creative way to use Elm ports and is worth checking out.
Elm list-selection Package — Brian Hicks/NoRedInk
I’ve been really into teaching myself to use the Elm type system to create nice abstractions that make my code more expressive. I thought this was a really cool example of that. If you want to store a list along with an optional selected member of that list, wouldn’t it be nice if you could store that information all together rather than as a list and another piece of state that stores the selection? This package allows you to do that. It also reminds me that it’s important to think more deeply about types and APIs when I write Elm code.
Refactoring Rails — Ben Orenstein
Ben is a pretty well known member of the Rails community and he’s recently gone out on his own. His first offering is going to be a video course on Rails refactoring. He’s released a few sample videos and they are superb. This is a topic that’s been covered a lot over the years but Ben brings a unique and highly practical approach to teaching this subject. I highly recommend getting on his mailing list so you can get the previews and maybe even an early chance to buy the course when it’s available.
Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub — Coraline Ada Ehmke
This is an article I wish didn’t have to exist but it’s a subject that needs to be discussed publicly. I really admire Coraline for having the courage to take this story public, even at the cost of her severance pay. Coraline was hired to work on a community and safety team at GitHub. The company had some issues with internal culture and were seemingly looking to build a team to repair the internal problems. Sadly, Coraline was a victim of that culture and is now willing to tell her story for the public. It’s not a happy read but one you should take the time to read.
